Conference Directors
Karyna Szmurlo (Ph.D. Rutgers University), Professor of French, has published on 18th- and 19th-century women writers, and modern literature. Her research is strongly interdisciplinary, combining history, feminist theory, philosophy of language, and the arts. She is the editor of The Novel's Seductions: Staël's Corinne in Critical Inquiry (Bucknell University Press, 1999), coeditor of Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders (Rutgers University Press, 1991), Staël's bibliographer in A Critical Bibliography of French Literature (Syracuse University Press, 1993), and more recently, a collaborating editor (with Florence Lotterie and Catriona Seth) of an international volume, Madame de Staël et les études féminines/Autour de Madame Necker (Editions Honoré Champion, 2006).
Among her writings on the French Revolution and language theory are "Pour une poétique des langues nationales" in Le Groupe de Coppet et l'Europe (Paris: Touzot, 1994) and "Vers la théorie du performatif" in Le Groupe de Coppet et le monde moderne (Genève: Droz, 1998). She also contributed to Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Modern Language Studies, George Sand Studies, French Forum, Cahiers staëliens, and Romance Quarterly. She serves on the Executive Board of the Germaine de Staël Society for Revolutionary and Romantic Studies, an allied organization of the American Association for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Email: skaryna@clemson.edu
Tili Boon Cuillé earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. She is Director of Undergraduate Studies in French, Director of the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon, Faculty Fellow for William Greenleaf Eliot Residential College, and a member of the MLA Division Executive Committee for Eighteenth-Century French Literature. Her area of specialization is eighteenth-century French literature and aesthetics, particularly the debates about the musical, visual, and performing arts.
Professor Cuillé is the author of Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (Toronto, 2006). She has also written several articles on literature and music, including “From the Comédie-Française to the Opéra: Figaro at the Crossroads” for the volume Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries (Ashgate, 2006), “Revoicing Rousseau: Staël’s Corinne and the Song of the South” for the volume Phrase and Subject: Studies in Music and Literature (Legenda, 2006), and “La Vraisemblance du merveilleux: Operatic Aesthetics in Cazotte’s Fantastic Fiction” for the journal Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Enchanted Enlightenment: French Ventures in Fiction, Imagery, and Stagecraft. Situated at the nexus of science, religion, and natural philosophy, this study reconsiders the French Enlightenment from the standpoint of literary criticism and cultural history, focusing on the popular genres of opera, the Ossian epics, oriental tales, and gothic fiction.
Email: tbcuille@wustl.edu